Quotes from John Buchan

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.

The greatest happiness in life is the knowledge that we are loved and valued for what we are, not for what we have or what we can do.

Wise men never grow up; indeed, they grow younger, for they lose the appalling worldly wisdom of youth.

I venerate the intellect of man. I believe in its undreamed-of possibilities, when it grows free like an oak in the forest and is not dwarfed in a flower-pot. From that allegiance I have never wavered. That is the God I have never forsworn.

It is not strength, but desire, that governs the world.

Supposing you knew -- not by sight or by instinct, but by sheer intellectual knowledge, as I know the truth of a mathematical proposition -- that what we call empty space was full, crammed. Not with lumps of what we call matter like hills and houses, but with things as real -- as real to the mind.

The true test of a man's character is not how he treats his friends, but how he treats his enemies.

We look for romance in the well-cultivated garden-plots, and when it springs out of virgin soil we are surprised, though any fool might know it was the natural place for it.

I have known fellows to whom the earth was so full of little pleasures that after the worst clouts they rose like larks from a furrow. A wise philosophy--but I had none of it. I always saw the little pageant of man's life like a child's peep-show beside the dark wastes of eternity.

Peace is that state in which fear of any kind is unknown.

I believe that all wisdom consists in caring immensely for a few right things, and not caring a straw about the rest.

We can pay our debt to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.

He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly, but because he felt deeply.

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.

I believe everything out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.

The true definition of a snob is one who craves for what separates men rather than for what unites them.

A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different.

It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might keep a man from yawning.

The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.

I am an ordinary sort of fellow, not braver than other people, but I hate to see a good man downed, and that long knife would not be the end of Scudder if I could play the game in his place.

The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.

I began to get really keen, for every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective.

We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.

To spend your days on such work when the world is chockful of amusing things. Life goes roaring by and you only hear the echo in your stuffy rooms.